The UMass History Magazine: Past, Present & Future
2024 Edition
Letter from the Chair
In 2023–24 we spent an exciting, stimulating, and often uncomfortable year debating this question: How does a history department engage with current events, politics, and activism?
As will surprise none of you, we did not reach a consensus, and probably never will. This is a testament to the diversity of viewpoints in our department, which permits the essential, informed, and vibrant debate that characterizes a democratic community like ours. (The conversation continues this year, most recently in the 2024–25 Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series: What Are Universities For? This was brilliantly organized by Outreach and Community Engagement Director Jess Johnson and Sigrid Schmalzer, Asheesh Kapur Siddique, and Kevin Young.)
Our intellectual activity was initially spurred by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. If the goal of Hamas leadership was to catapult the Palestinian cause back into global view, they succeeded in the case of the Department of History at UMass Amherst, which was consumed with the ramifications of that single event and the subsequent Israeli war in Gaza. Members of our department, from students to faculty to staff, all considered the following questions:
How do we respond to terrible events in real time? How do we understand a complex situation with multiple sides, viewpoints, actors, and actions? Once we head towards understanding, what do we actually do? These challenges underscored the absence of our treasured colleague, Professor Alon Confino, Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. An expert on the Israel-Palestine conflict, he was out all year on medical leave until his untimely passing in June 2024. The loss of his calm wisdom at precisely this time was devastating. Our conversations were further hampered by our pandemic habits of communicating online, not face-to-face. It was sometimes hard to remember how to discuss volatile topics in person, but we persevered.
Meanwhile, some students at UMass were protesting the political situation, and 57 of them were arrested in October 2023 at a sit-in in Whitmore Administration Building. Months later in May, 134 people, including 70 students, as well as six faculty and grad students from our own department, were arrested on the lawn near the campus pond. As a result, heated debates swirled around questions of the right to political protest, the role of campus and state police in responding to protestors, how the administration should handle student discipline, and even the relevant material culture (zip ties, wooden barricades, fire codes and land-use codes, body armor, holding cells, and access to water and bathrooms). You (and we) had passionate and frequently thoughtful conversations about every detail of these events in emails, on social media, on the UMass subreddit, and in person while also watching the national press report on similar events at other universities.
Attempts to grapple with all of this led our department to contemplate other questions over the course of the year: What is free speech, especially in the university context, and does it have limits? What is academic freedom? How does a department responsibly support both academic freedom and free speech while avoiding antisemitism and Islamophobia, which cause such harm to our entire community and to individuals within it? What tensions exist between the contractual rights of faculty to broad academic freedom and the ethical responsibility of faculty to judiciously invoke only their own true expertise? What is expertise anyhow, and who defines it? I won’t pretend that we came to a consensus here either, but the discussions were timely, stimulating, and important.
But that was not all we did this year.
In less political news, but in response to nationwide economic trends, we implemented a robust program to support our current undergraduates and recruit more. You know how important a history degree can be for thoughtful humans trying to navigate a complex world. So do we. But history majors are declining nationwide, and majors and their families are worried about careers. So, we’re working to provide clear messaging about the lifelong value of historically minded critical thinking, spearheaded by the indomitable Sarah Cornell, our undergraduate program director; the department’s undergraduate program coordinator, Meredith Pustell; and an excellent group of students, including Andrew Bielecki ’24 and Jillian Gochinski ’24, who serve as informal ambassadors for the department. Simultaneously, we’ve reveled in the powerhouse activities of Jessica Keene, who teaches career classes for us and for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, runs our newly robust alumni-student engagement program, and even finds time for classes on Renaissance England (her research specialty) as well. (Did I say powerhouse?)
This past year, we also began to focus on streamlining our graduate program in the face of a tight job market in academia and a student culture that has clearly not recovered from the pandemic. We also seek to better support student interest in historically informed activism and social justice. Renewing our program for current and future needs was begun by Joel Wolfe, who served as graduate program director until August 2024, and was then succeeded by Alice Nash, who is bringing her own ideas to bear. Working with them is our accomplished director of public history, Sam Redman. And of course, this is all made possible by the brilliant work of Mary Lashway, our graduate program coordinator. Meanwhile, Stefanie Austin, our financial manager, kept an eye on the necessary funding for all these important programs, itself a huge task.
2023–24 was also the first year for Garrett Washington, our director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Taking a holistic view of the entire department and programs, he and the DEI committee worked towards creating the thoughtful, inclusive, and close history community we hope to become. They had a lot to figure out, but it was a productive first year. Washington’s approach resembled that of our associate chair, Priyanka Srivastava, who watched over departmental teaching offerings with a similarly broad view. These officers came together with the more focused program directors to provide me with wide-ranging and thoughtful advice and counsel, for which I was deeply grateful.
On a sadder note: In addition to the abovementioned untimely loss of Professor Confino, we also said farewell to Professor Emeritus Ron Story, who passed away in June. We will miss them both greatly. We invite you to read our tributes to them.
Sincerely,
Anne F. Broadbridge
From the Desk of the Undergraduate Program Director
The undergraduate program flourished last year as we built upon our existing strengths while introducing new projects and events and revitalizing our curriculum. In February, history’s undergraduate program and Community Engagement Office held a successful soft launch of our new community college pipeline joint initiative. We invited Massachusetts community college students to visit UMass Amherst together. Students from Greenfield Community College, Berkshire Community College, and Holyoke Community College attended lectures in various history classrooms, met with advisors and faculty, visited the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, and lunched with current history majors at Blue Wall. Participants reported that this structured visit helped ensure that the state’s flagship campus did not feel overwhelming, that experiencing the visit with students in similar situations was invaluable, and that they felt welcomed and valued. As Massachusetts just made community college free for state residents who have never before earned a degree, and community college transfer students contribute so much to our community, the history department looks forward to strengthening our ties to community colleges and their students who wish to pursue a bachelor’s degree. Read "Clearing a Path" to see snapshots from our launch event and read about one of the transfer students who brings so much to our department.
The history department is proud of all of our extraordinary students. Last year, the undergraduate program made 44 awards to 32 students to honor their exceptional academics, outstanding writing, and remarkable contributions to the department, and to support their future endeavors (see the list of awards and winners). The awards ceremony was a highlight of the year. Over 100 faculty, family, friends, and awardees gathered to celebrate together while many others joined us via Zoom.
THE MAC DONNELL PRIZE
2024 Mac Donnell Prize recipient Theoni Ethridge studies primary sources for a spring 2024 research paper on Mary Tudor’s attempt to reinstate Catholicism in England and the martyrs who were persecuted for keeping the Protestant faith. Her research on British monarchical history was inspired by her childhood travels to London; she returned to Europe to study abroad this summer. One of 12 named scholarships for undergraduates, the Mac Donnell Prize is awarded to rising juniors who have a 3.0 GPA or higher and are focused on Irish and British history.
The undergraduate program highly values internships, which are crucial for career development, and we are grateful that we have awards to fund some of our majors’ unpaid and underpaid internships. This summer, our students held a wide range of impressive internships, including at the American Historical Association (Washington, D.C.), Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project (Italy), Ramirez and Sunnerberg, LLC (law firm), the office of U.S. Congressman Jake Auchincloss, Historic Deerfield, the City of Boston, the office of Massachusetts State Representative Mindy Domb, the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House Museum, Breakthrough Manchester, Arlington Historical Society (Virginia), Hingham Historical Society, and more. Turn to the student news section to read about some of their experiences.
History’s Internship and Career Development Office offers classes; works individually with students applying to graduate school, law school, internships, and jobs; and organizes career-focused panels and events. Our career advisor, Jessica Keene, was joined by Yuri Gama, who served his first year as our internship and career advisor. Of special note this year were our alumni dinners profiled at right. Additionally, we were thrilled that UMass alumna U.S. Representative Becca Balint ’01MA (D-VT) held a Zoom conversation for our majors interested in careers in government and politics.
History’s Louis Greenbaum History Honors Research Award funded our students’ research for their senior honors theses at archives and institutions both abroad and in the United States; read about one student’s experience and thesis here. Daniel Gordon completed his final year as history’s honors director. He leaves an impressive legacy, having strengthened the program and expanded the opportunity of researching and writing a thesis to all history majors. We are delighted that Asheesh Kapur Siddique is stepping into the role. Students have the opportunity to publish parts of their thesis or other original research in the student-run Undergraduate History Journal.
Many history majors continue to broaden their education by taking advantage of UMass Amherst’s fantastic study abroad programs. The history department is proud to support equity of access to study abroad by offering scholarships for the popular Oxford Summer Seminar. Several of our history majors spent their first semester studying in London as part of the new First-Year Program Abroad in London, which includes a required history course on exploring and analyzing the global city. Other history majors lived and studied in diverse locales ranging from Singapore to Italy.
Here in Amherst, our faculty developed our curriculum in exciting ways. Siddique taught the history of data for the first time while Alice Nash offered her innovative new course, Indigenous History for STEM. Elizabeth Jacob offered multiple new courses on African gender and sexuality and African history through film and literature. Matthew Wormer introduced Drugs and Capitalism in Global History. Jason Moralee and Hans Wietzke (classics) developed and co-taught a course on ancient heritage and modern racism while Visiting Lecturer Mohammad Ataie ’20PhD created a new course on the Iranian Revolution from a global perspective.
Last year, faculty also revitalized many courses that had not been offered recently. Wormer updated a course on globalization in the Indian Ocean as well as surveys of English history and British history while Keene introduced an updated course on the Tudors. Gordon brought back Comparative Revolutions in the Modern Era.
This momentum continued in fall ’24 as exciting new history courses premiered, including History and Video Games and a seminar on Alexander the Great. Many history majors enrolled in the new fall Feinberg course, The Power of Universities, while others took the opportunity to participate in the Feinberg Series by taking a one-credit Feinberg add-on associated with many history courses.
—Sarah Cornell
Sarah Cornell is a senior lecturer in the history department, the director of the department’s undergraduate program, and an award-winning teacher and scholar whose research focuses on the United States and the world in the age of emancipation.
The undergraduate program depends on the work of so many individuals. For their invaluable contributions in 2023–24, I thank Christian Appy, Alyssa Arnell, Stefanie Austin, Anne Broadbridge, Joanna Hejl, Daniel Gordon, Yuri Gama, Emily Hamilton, Jess Johnson, Jessica Keene, Mary Lashway, Jason Moralee, Alice Nash, Jennifer Nye, Meredith Pustell, Blake Spitz, Garrett Washington, Caroline White, Matthew Wormer, and Amelia Yeager.
Making Memory: Interpreting Violent Histories Near and Far
RESEARCH PROFILE | ANNA PELLETIERE ’24
While studying in Buenos Aires in the spring of my junior year, I visited the Ex-Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada (Ex-ESMA) site for the first time. This former Navy school was used as a clandestine detention center during the authoritarian military dictatorship of 1976–1983. Now, it is the home of a powerful memory site. Developed in close collaboration with survivors, Ex-ESMA (pictured here) is explicitly oriented as a dedication to those who were “disappeared” on its grounds. As I left, I considered the sites of slavery I visited growing up and how wildly different the visitor experience and educational outcomes were. The juxtaposition inspired my senior honors thesis, which compared how the Ex-ESMA in Argentina and two presidential homes that interpret slavery in the United States operate as sites of memory.
In January 2024, I visited all three sites—the Ex-ESMA and the homes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In both Buenos Aires and Virginia, I went on guided tours, studied the placards at the sites, and spoke directly with guides to understand how visitors might experience the sites and how these sites might learn from each other. At both U.S. sites, I was struck by the dual narrative at play, both lionizing their presidential inhabitants and attempting to remember those they enslaved. In the United States, sites need to adopt an uncontested commitment to being memory sites to enslaved people rather than memorials to enslavers, which the Ex-ESMA models perfectly. For the Ex-ESMA, as time progresses and visitors become more distanced from the histories being told, understanding how U.S. sites contend with this distance is vital.
These shared, contentious histories need to be understood by audiences beyond historians, so the act of creating dedicated public memory sites where visitors can meaningfully engage with difficult histories is vital. Personally, this work drew a direct line from my dual interests in museums and histories of resistance to state violence through to the modern-day implications of these sites, which cemented my desire to continue working with public history and memory studies to bring the past into the present and ensure these violent histories are never repeated.
—Anna Pelletiere ’24
Anna Pelletiere graduated with honors in May 2024 with degrees in history, economics, and art history and is currently the First-Year Program assistant at UMass’s First-Year Program Abroad in Madrid. Her research was supported by the Louis Greenbaum History Honors Research Award and completed under the guidance of her advisor, Kevin Young.
THE LOUIS GREENBAUM HISTORY HONORS RESEARCH AWARD
Honoring the life and work of Louis S. Greenbaum, who taught in the history department from 1955–1992, this award supports rising senior history majors writing honors theses. Pelletiere used the award to conduct research in Virginia and Buenos Aires for her senior honors thesis, “Maintaining Memory: Comparing Sites of Erasure and Memory in the United States and Argentina.” “This work ... cemented my desire to continue working with public history and memory studies to bring the past into the present and ensure these violent histories are never repeated,” she noted.
Clearing a Path: Welcoming Community College Transfer Students to UMass
The history department is recruiting transfer students from community colleges in the commonwealth to study history at UMass. “We are working to strengthen our connections with various community colleges, facilitate the transfer process, and eliminate barriers,” explains Outreach and Community Engagement Director Jess Johnson, who collaborates with Undergraduate Program Director Sarah Cornell on these initiatives. One such program is the UMass History Visit Day, an annual daylong immersion first introduced in 2024. While on campus, students learn about the transfer process; meet history students, faculty, and advisors; sit in on classes; and explore the university’s archives. Pictured here, Greenfield Community College student Hollis Cox and history department chair Anne Broadbridge explore a 14th century manuscript.
“Community college students belong at UMass.” —Jess Johnson
History major Simon Nam-Krane transferred from Bunker Hill Community College to the UMass Commonwealth Honors College in spring 2024. He spent his summer interning for Ramirez and Sunnerberg, LLC, where he tracked client programs, transcribed hearings, and organized case information. Combined with his history studies, the experience has prepared him for a career as a lawyer.
HISTORY ALUMNI NETWORKING DINNER
With the variety of careers open to history majors, a little perspective from those who have been there before can go a long way. To help students explore potential career paths while building their networks, the department’s Internship and Career Development Office hosts professional development events throughout the year with the help of our alumni.
The culminating event is the annual UMass History Alumni Networking Dinner in the spring, where alumni return to campus to enjoy dinner and meet the next generation of history majors. Alumni working in law, hospitality, libraries, museum education, government, writing, defense, and more sparked conversations with undergrads about taking steps to turn their passion for history into a career. This past fall, the addition of the inaugural Homecoming Alumni Dinner joined the established spring dinner and periodic coffee hours in bringing our alumni and current students together.
The Department of History’s Internship and Career Development Office thanks Jaffar Shiek ’17, Al Culliton ’05, David Farrell ’99, Aibhlin Hannigan ’17, Devon King ’18, ’22MA, David Connelly ’92, Kate Freedman ’09MA, ’18PhD, and Robert LaRussa ’76 for participating in the 2024 Alumni Networking Dinner and U.S. Representative Becca Balint ’01MA, Ellie Costello ’23, Laura Haskell ’23, Peter Lamothe ’93, and Debra Wing-Colson ’23 for their participation in other careers events.
Get Involved!
Alumni—want to support current history majors in their professional development? Contact Undergraduate Career Advisor Jessica Keene at jkeene@umass.edu.
Paradigm Shift: Teaching History to STEM Students
“Many STEM undergraduates think of science as a simple, objective, value-neutral method of understanding nature. A historical perspective complicates that.” —Brian Ogilvie
Each semester, some of the history department’s most popular classes fill with scientists. Courses in the history of science, technology, and medicine attract students from across the university, giving them a historical perspective as they train for careers in the sciences. For instance, Brian Ogilvie—who teaches courses on natural history, the history of technology, and even magic and witchcraft—shows his students that “social, religious, and other views did—and do—affect science.”
Julia Stearns ’24 (below) was an environmental studies major when they decided to take Alice Nash’s Indigenous History for STEM course. “I was beginning to see science within the context of systemic oppression and its potential for justice work,” Stearns says, “but I also saw how we miss the mark in centering Indigenous people and reparations.” The course’s focus on Indigenous perspectives in history empowered them to reckon with problematic complexities in environmental science, like the role of European colonization in the history of agriculture. Armed with a Bachelor’s Degree with Individual Concentration in community agriculture and Indigenous studies, Stearns plans to pursue community organizing and food autonomy work—ambitions inspired by their research on decolonizing permaculture in Nash’s class.
As a first-year student, Darsh Patel (left) learned about social and political movements related to science in Sigrid Schmalzer’s History of Science Activism course, which helped shape the impact he hopes to make as a physician. Examining primary sources from the activist group Science for the People from the 1980s—and critiquing misogyny and racism in the history of science activism—informed his contribution to radical curriculum development in the western Massachusetts chapter of the organization. “That historical context guides me in the work we do today, connecting with community organizers and seeing how we can allocate resources to assist in their efforts,” Patel reports. Now a junior biochemistry and molecular biology student, Patel conducts research in UMass’s Muscle Biology Laboratory, where he seeks to improve the quality of life for older adults. “I am pursuing this research because of what I learned in the history course,” he says. “I want to produce scientific knowledge that can be used to improve people’s health without causing destruction or exploitation.”
For students who pursue the medical humanities certificate, Emily Hamilton’s History of Health Care and Medicine in the U.S. class is a key requirement. “Many STEM majors are accustomed to coursework that has definitive right and wrong answers,” she reports. “History is different.” STEM majors are a majority of students in Hamilton’s class, which contextualizes medicine within American history—and leaves an impact. “Students come back and tell me that what they learned in my classes helped them to practice a more empathetic and informed form of medicine,” Hamilton says. “Having even a small role in making this kind of change in the world … brings me back to the classroom, semester after semester.”
—Amelia Yeager
Amelia Yeager ’24MA served as communications coordinator for the history department from fall 2023 to summer 2024.
From the Desk of the Graduate Program Director
During the 2023–24 academic year, 36 doctoral students, 11 MA students, and 27 public history certificate students engaged in rigorous study of the past in the history department. Working with faculty across the department, campus, and the Five Colleges, they studied a diverse range of time periods, regions, and themes, including department strengths like public history, modern China, and U.S. history, as well as global, Latin American, and European history and the histories of labor, gender, imperialism, and science.
These program strengths, plus an increasing intradisciplinary diversity, were reflected in this year’s robust course offerings. Courses included two U.S. history seminars, one on modern China, and six on public history. In their first year as faculty members, Matthew Wormer and Elizabeth Jacob offered popular courses in world history and in gender and sexuality in African history, rounding out our offerings in global history, which also included courses in ancient Persia and Middle Eastern history. Additionally, we offered generalist courses, including the introductory graduate seminar and two one-credit professional development classes. Students further deepened their learning by taking classes in other departments, including architecture, labor studies, Afro-American studies, and women, gender, sexuality studies.
On top of their coursework, comprehensive exams, and dissertation writing, our students are getting a head start on their scholarly careers by publishing articles, reviews, and even books. Yuri Gama published two book reviews on modern Brazilian labor history, and Bing Xia published an article in The PRC History Review on how Mao-era government officials disciplined persons accused of extramarital relationships. Published last summer, Seth Kershner’s co-authored book, Breaking the War Habit: The Debate over Militarism in American Education (University of Georgia Press, 2022), was a finalist for the History of Education Society’s Outstanding Book Award.
Presenting at conferences across the United States and abroad allowed graduate students to share their original research while making professional connections and taking inspiration from other historians. Joanna Hejl presented her research on local queer pastkeepers at the American Association for State and Local History Conference, while María B. Portilla Moya presented on the significance of the Ecuadorian collective memory of the 1822 Battle of Pichincha at the Ibero-American Symposium on the History of Cartography in Montevideo.
Following the culmination of years of work, three doctoral students completed dissertations that made substantial and innovative contributions to their respective fields. Blending biography and intellectual history, Destiney Linker ’24PhD’s dissertation explored the transformation of radical Black women’s internationalist politics during and after the Black Power era. Shay Olmstead ’24PhD’s work examined the history and impact of employment discrimination claims brought by trans people in the United States. And Sean Hough ’24PhD focused on the commemorative influence of the Volksbund, a West German-based commission that oversaw the preservation and commemoration of German war graves across cemeteries in Cold War Europe. We invite you to read more about their projects and future plans in the student news section.
Today, “historian” is a job title that demands a diverse skill set. In addition to written scholarship, students engage with the past by creating and participating in podcasts, video interviews, film screenings, and more. In doing so, they prepare for well-rounded careers—and, in some cases, contribute directly to popular conversations about history. To share just a few examples, Anotida Chikumbu hosts a video interview series with scholars from across the world, including this year’s Distinguished Annual Lecturer Michael Willrich (read an excerpt of their conversation). Lauren Whitley-Haney is co-host of Blood and Oil, ranked No. 5 on the 10 best Louisiana history podcasts earlier this year. Kim Enderle and Ross Caputi developed public programs with the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy. And three students—Joanna Hejl, Amelia Yeager, and Yuri Gama—brought their skills to the daily operations of the department by running its social media accounts, developing events and programs, advising undergraduates, and even editing this very magazine!
Indeed, graduate students are instrumental to the success of our department. As instructors and teaching assistants, they develop lectures, lead discussions, and provide assistance with writing and editing to make an impact on undergraduate historians. Graduate students also strengthened our program through their sustained advocacy around department culture and graduate student funding. As active members of the committees on diversity, equity, and inclusion and on graduate funding, they collaborated with staff and faculty to develop town hall discussions and to craft recommendations to provide more predictable, consistent, and transparent funding structures.
The last event of the academic year was one of its highlights. At the annual awards ceremony, we honored our 11 graduating students and presented awards and scholarships to 21 more. Supplementing students’ external awards, these department scholarships support travel to conferences and archives, language learning, and research, and honor excellence in teaching and writing. We are grateful to our donors, whose support makes studying history at UMass Amherst such a robust and worthwhile educational experience, and to our students, whose time in the program makes a lasting impact on all of us.
—Joel Wolfe
Joel Wolfe is a professor of history and was graduate program director from 2021–2024, where he worked closely with Graduate Program Coordinator Mary Lashway, whom he credits and thanks profusely.
MILITARISM IN SCHOOLS
PhD candidate Seth Kershner is the co-author of Breaking the War Habit: The Debate over Militarism in American Education (University of Georgia Press, 2022), which was a semi-finalist for the History of Education Society’s Outstanding Book Award. The book considers the history of military recruitment in schools, its influence over public education, and efforts to resist this. Kershner is one of several graduate students whose work focuses on the history of U.S. empire, a long-standing strength of the history department’s graduate program.
To Build Anew: The Graduate History Association
From the Desks of the GHA Co-chairs
This year, the Graduate History Association (GHA) held a number of events to support their long-standing goals: fostering academic growth and building a strong graduate community. One of the highlights of the year was a lunch in March where a small group of graduate students had the opportunity to discuss their research with Amherst College’s Lisa Brooks, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning book Our Beloved Kin (Yale University Press, 2018).
In April, the GHA invited graduate students to attend—virtually and in person—their 20th annual conference, Contested Ground: Claiming and Reclaiming Territory in History. After a keynote from Mount Holyoke College historian Abhilash Medhi, an interdisciplinary group of students from universities in Canada and the United States presented on a broad range of topics, from the meaning of ruins in video games to visual culture and Black women’s resistance. All presenters engaged the question of how historians might connect ideas about borders—physical, political, and cultural—to modern-day issues of justice and injustice.
As the spring 2024 semester came to an end, the GHA officers realized that their remaining budget could help even more students. With buy-in from their fellow students and approval from department leadership, the GHA was able to provide over $3,000 in small grants to support students’ summer studies.
—Tim Hastings
With Joanna Hejl ’24MA, doctoral candidate Tim Hastings served as GHA co-chair for the 2023–24 school year. Jamie Mastrogiacomo ’24MA also served in fall 2023. They would like to thank all the faculty members and students who volunteered their time for the GHA conference and other events this year.
THE GHA SUMMER STUDY GRANT
This summer, GHA grant recipient Caitlyn Foster ’22 conducted research on how different groups used religion to interact with the royal family during ancient Egypt’s Ptolemaic period for her MA thesis. She used her grant money to take an online course called Death and Divinity in Graeco-Roman Egypt through the UK-based Bloomsbury Summer School, which gave her a better understanding of the beliefs around death and the afterlife, burial customs for different social classes, and how the history of the field has impacted the archaeological material studied today. At left is a primary source used in Foster’s thesis. This 360–350 BC hydria, or water jar, depicts the Adonia, a festival commemorating the death of Aphrodite’s consort Adonis commonly evoked in Ptolemaic poetry.
American Anarchy: A Discussion with Distinguished Annual Lecturer Michael Willrich
After delivering the Department of History’s Distinguished Annual Lecture in March 2024, Michael Willrich spoke with doctoral candidate Anotida Chikumbu about his career, the Progressive Era, and his book American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.
AC: Can you tell our readers about your research interests, the courses you teach, and your previous scholarship?
MW: I am a historian of the modern United States. I specialize in social and legal history … [and] I am especially interested in how ordinary people experienced, tangled with, and shaped the powerful interventionist state that emerged with a new urban-industrial society around the turn of the 20th century—the period American historians call the Progressive Era.
In my first book, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (Cambridge University Press, 2003), I traced the rise of radical new ideas about the social causes of crime in modern industrial cities and the new institutions of law and liberal governance that those ideas helped bring into being. My second book, Pox: An American History (Penguin Press, 2011), tells the story of the great wave of smallpox epidemics that swept across America and its overseas territories around the turn of the 20th century, spurring the growth of modern public health authority and engendering widespread opposition to the government policy of compulsory vaccination. Pox had a whole new life during the COVID-19 pandemic!
AC: Your latest book, American Anarchy, was published by Basic Books in fall 2023. What are its core ideas and central argument?
MW: One central argument of the book is that the government’s “war on anarchy” set the foundations of the modern surveillance state—an interlocking set of administrative agencies, including the Bureau of Immigration and the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, that served a congressional mandate to spy on citizens and to deport non-citizens who held radical beliefs.
A second argument of the book is that anarchists—despite their condemnation of the rule of law as mere window dressing for capitalist rule—actually helped usher in the modern civil liberties movement. Emma Goldman and her longtime anarchist comrade Alexander Berkman became innovative legal strategists. They turned their criminal trials into spectacular media events. They created legal defense funds to defend anarchists, birth control activists, pacifists, and other political prisoners during World War I and the Red Scare. And the anarchists helped give rise to the first generation of American civil liberties lawyers, like the young New York lawyer, Harry Weinberger, who represented anarchists in criminal conspiracy trials, deportation hearings, and before the U.S. Supreme Court. Out of those cases emerged distinctly modern arguments for First Amendment rights.
AC: How does American Anarchy contribute to or challenge the conventional discourse on American anarchism and the Progressive Era?
MW: I think what’s really new about my book is the way it brings together social, legal, and political history to tell the big American story of anarchism and the state. My book pays special attention to the anarchists’ political and legal ideas, their serious engagement with law, and the nascent civil liberties movement. It shows how two opposing ideas—anarchism and the rule of law—shaped American society and law through the intertwined lives of people like Goldman and her lawyer, Harry Weinberger, and men like J. Edgar Hoover, who led the government’s war against anarchy.
—Anotida Chikumbu and Michael Willrich
A Revolution across the Arts and Sciences: A Provocative New Look at China’s Great Leap Forward
RESEARCH PROFILE | JAEHEE SEOL, GUANHUA TAN, BING XIA, FANQI XU
At an international workshop this spring, four UMass graduate students investigated participatory knowledge production during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–61). While the Leap is understandably remembered for economic disaster and famine, their projects pursued fresh questions about concurrent efforts to revolutionize the arts and sciences. Hosted by professors Sigrid Schmalzer and Christine Ho (art history), the workshop produced 10 path-breaking papers now under consideration for publication as an edited volume with Hong Kong University Press.
In the photo above, Schmalzer pores over images from the Great Leap Forward with Jaehee Seol, whose paper examined exhibitions of rural life curated in partnership with local peasants, and Fanqi Xu, who argued that decentralized, village-based meteorology challenged scientific hegemony while strengthening political hegemony.
In the photo at left, Guanhua Tan presents at a conference in Berlin. Tan’s work shows that in history education, the Leap emphasized student discussion over memorization of textbooks, furthering the the Chinese Communist Party’s goal of inverting intellectual hierarchies. A fourth student, Bing Xia (not pictured), wrote about the promise and limits of “production calisthenics,” created by physiologists who tapped workers’ subjective experience of labor and fatigue.
The background image is a poster promoting the Great Leap Forward, portraying “socialist construction” (the horse) borne aloft by the wings of “technological revolution” and “cultural revolution.”
From the Desk of the Public History Program Director
This year, our community of public historians experienced productive challenges and deepened ongoing work here in the Connecticut River Valley and across the country.
We kicked off our year with a field trip to two historic house museums in eastern Massachusetts: Historic New England’s Eustis Estate and the Adams National Historical Park. During the visits, students learned how the former encourages visitors to touch (nearly) everything, which generated discussions of access and engagement at the latter following a more traditional approach. In February, we visited Historic Deerfield, where we learned about new interpretive programs, including a walking tour app designed to deepen public interpretation of the region’s Indigenous histories.
Our cornerstone seminar, Introduction to Public History, welcomed a new cohort of public historians from our department and from across campus. Students in the class worked on projects ranging from the history of student activism to the story of midwifery in the United States. Our semester together in Museum and Historic Site Interpretation was spent reading both classic and cutting-edge works of scholarship on a range of subjects. Public history graduate students also enrolled in Stephen Platt’s Writing History class, which brought the craft of nonfiction writing to students’ historical research; Alice Nash’s Indigenous Peoples and Public History seminar on how Indigenous communities are reclaiming public history spaces from their origins in erasure and dispossession; and Jon Olsen’s Digital History (see below, "Putting the Past on the Map") and Comparative Memory seminars, which explored impacts of new media on history and parsed national cultures of memory after 1945, respectively. Undergraduate students explored public history through Elizabeth Sharpe’s History and Its Publics seminar on making history accessible to broader audiences. Students also undertook a variety of independent studies and ventured outside of the history department to learn about topics like historic preservation and arts management.
This year, public history students and faculty continued to engage with issues of worldwide relevance from right here in the Valley. Marcus Smith (doctoral student, Afro-American studies) began leading tours at the W. E. B. Du Bois National Historic Site in 2023 and now serves on the advisory board for the restoration of Du Bois’s childhood church, Clinton Memorial African Episcopal Zion, alongside Professor Emeritus David Glassberg.
Marla Miller, Meghan Gelardi Holmes ’06MA, and doctoral candidate Erika Slocumb (Afro-American studies) are convenors of the Community of Practice on Interpreting Slavery and Freedom for the New England Museum Association, bringing together museum professionals to support each other as they share histories that may challenge their visitors. These efforts complement the work of members of the department and partners at the W. E. B. Du Bois Library and the Pioneer Valley History Network on “Documenting the Early History of Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley,” which received funding from Five Colleges, Inc., and a National Endowment for the Humanities award in fall 2023.
This year, Diana Sierra Becerra completed her manuscript, The Making of Revolutionary Feminism in El Salvador, which is currently in production with Cambridge University Press. The project draws on extensive oral histories to show how Salvadoran women revolutionaries developed a vision of women’s liberation within the workers’ movement of the mid-to-late 20th century and, in fact, changed the meaning and course of the revolution.
In March, alumna Dr. Judith A. Barter ’91PhD visited for lunch with students and faculty, who heard about her career as a museum curator. In addition to generously sharing her time, Barter supports students’ professional development through the Barter Internship Fellowship (see below, "History of / at Work").
Students enriched their networks at conferences near and far, including the Mass History Conference and the annual meetings of the New England Museum Association and the National Council on Public History (NCPH), which the program co-sponsored. June’s Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife centered upon New England forests, with Miller serving as president of the Board of Trustees and Nash serving on the program committee. At the 2024 NCPH conference, anthropology doctoral student Abby Thomsen and Amelia Yeager ’24MA turned their summer 2023 experiences as Dr. Charles K. Hyde Public History Program Fellows into posters covering the data crisis in collections and interpreting African American literary networks, respectively.
This year, five students received Hyde Fellowships, allowing them to complete internships that provide invaluable professional experience (see list of recipients under "Award-Winning Students"). Also, thanks to Dr. Charles K. Hyde, our classes hosted various Hyde Visiting Practitioners like Lacey Wilson of the Albany Institute of History and Art and alumna Felicia Jamison ’17PhD of the University of Louisville, who helped students expand their professional networks and discuss how their seminar topics take shape outside of the classroom.
We are proud of our recent alumni, including Jamie Mastrogiacomo ’24MA, who moved to Washington, D.C. to become a United States Capitol visitor guide. Joanna Hejl ’24MA and Marisa Budlong ’24MA stayed in the area and are working at the Yiddish Book Center and Historic Deerfield, respectively. Jillian Gochinski ’24 also stayed local—she remains at UMass as a graduate student pursuing the history MA and graduate certificate in public history after kick-starting her learning over the summer as a fellow at Historic Deerfield. Congratulations to our MA and PhD certificate recipients, who will no doubt use their public history skills to forge meaningful connections between the public and the past. We look forward to embarking on new projects and deepening our connections in the Valley and beyond this year!
—Sam Redman
Sam Redman is a professor of history, director of the Public History Program, and the author of three books on U.S. social, cultural, and intellectual history. He thanks Joanna Hejl ’24MA for her extraordinary contributions as public history assistant this past year. The programs described above would not have been possible without her hard work.
YIDDISH PUBLIC HISTORY
Maya González ’23MA (L) conducted research at Amherst’s Yiddish Book Center as the Harriett and Seymour Shapiro Fellow during the 2023–24 academic year before returning to UMass as a PhD student this fall. After graduating in May of this year, Joanna Hejl ’24MA (R) began her job at the center as a development manager. This summer, González and Hejl worked together alongside posters, books, and other materials in Yiddish.
Clothes Encounters: Unpacking the Le Gip Archive
Professor Alice Nash and doctoral student Elizabeth Pangburn steward the Le Gip Archive, a historic clothing collection that includes the designs, personal fashions, and creative ephemera of African American dancer, “voodoo” drummer, designer, and so-called “Mayor of Greenwich Village” Byron Le Gip.
In May 2024, Nash and Pangburn took their research to another level by recreating the photographic exhibit of Le Gip’s 1956 collection held at the famous Cafe Rienzi in Greenwich Village. With student models Sam Cadwell (a former history department office assistant) and Amelia Yeager ’24MA, Pangburn matched archival garments, including items from Le Gip’s personal wardrobe, to archival photographs. “There’s a lot you can only learn about clothing from watching it move,” says Pangburn.
The color has faded since top model Anne St. Marie wore Le Gip’s “Sun Goddess” dress (ca. 1960), but the dress is otherwise in excellent condition. The dress is worn here by Amelia Yeager ‘24MA. Among Le Gip’s most notable designs is the “Le Gip Tunic”, a genderless garment with a wide neck and batwing sleeves modeled at right by Sam Caldwell.
A WORD FROM THE DIRECTOR OF DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION
Drawing on informal discussions, moderated conversations, and working groups over the past few years, in the spring of 2023, the history department voted to create the position of director of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I was honored to be chosen by the outgoing department chair to fill that role in its inaugural year. Throughout the year, I fielded questions and concerns about issues related to inclusivity, diversity, and equity. I also offered a one-credit graduate seminar, Diversity and Inclusivity in Teaching and Professional Development, which provided students, faculty, and even a few staff members with resources and the chance to discuss DEI considerations related to teaching and the job market. But one particularly noteworthy initiative was the creation of the department’s first DEI committee.
After working on ground rules for discussion and drafting a department DEI statement, committee members focused on two town halls that took place in the spring semester. With over 30 students, faculty, and staff in attendance at each, these events were sometimes emotionally difficult but illuminating and succeeded in bringing members of the history department community together for in-person dialogue. The conversations and feedback from those town halls were instrumental in informing priorities and strategies for the graduate studies committee and the department officers. It was a pleasure and an eye-opening experience working with the DEI committee, and I am looking forward to building on last year’s momentum in my second year as DEI director.
—Garrett Washington
Garrett Washington is an associate professor of history and director of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the history department.
Garrett Washington thanks everyone who worked on the committee’s efforts this year, including Professor Emily Hamilton; Graduate Program Coordinator Mary Lashway; graduate students Jessica Scott, Katlyn Durand, Shilpa Sharma Dille, and Gaye Ozpinar; and undergraduate students Stephanie Saint Pierre, Catherine Wan, Robbie Mottau, and Natalie Rubin.
History of/at Work: Barter Fellow Brings Local History to a Site of National Significance
RESEARCH PROFILE | JESSICA ANTONIA CASILLAS SCOTT
For nearly 250 years, the Springfield Armory has stood on a hill overlooking the city and the Connecticut River. Created by Congress as the national arms manufactory, it was a key employer in Springfield from its inception during the American Revolution until its closure in the 1960s. Now a National Park Service site, it is best known for its collection of historic American weapons—the largest in the world. However, the park also tells important industrial and labor histories, and it is these other areas that have inspired doctoral student Jessica Scott.
“The majority of visitors come from over 100 miles away. By emphasizing labor history, we refocus on local connections to the site and can think forward about the armory’s role as a public resource.” —Jessica Scott
When she began working there two summers ago as a Dr. Judith A. Barter Internship Fellow, Scott’s goal was to connect the public with the historical resources available at the armory. But the museum’s focus on firearms did not resonate with many local residents. Scott soon learned that seeing their own history represented would get people in the door. For families that have lived in Springfield for generations, stories of parents and grandparents working at the armory foster a sense of local pride and belonging. She had the chance to engage many of them when she produced Worker Weekend, two days of programming on labor history, research workshops, and opportunities for descendants to share their stories.
Scott got to work planning sessions, getting buy-in from staff, and tracking down workers’ descendants to participate as panelists and audience members. During Worker Weekend in September 2023, they learned how to conduct family research and oral histories with armory resources. Some attendees even brought their own mementos to add to the museum’s collections.
Supported by a National Park Service grant, this past summer Scott returned to the armory to further expand the site’s engagement with the Springfield community. In addition to planning another Worker Weekend, she conducted a survey to assess how Springfield residents interact with the armory and what they want to see from it. Simultaneously, Scott spent time in the archives to reimagine how visitors might experience the collection—through interpretation of firearms owned by Native people, for instance. This research has made it possible to tell a broader history of labor at the site, a history of many different types of work performed on that hill in Springfield.
—Joanna Hejl ’24MA
Joanna Hejl ’24MA is a nonprofit fundraising professional at the Yiddish Book Center. She worked as the Public History Program assistant in 2023–24.
JESSICA ANTONIA CASILLAS SCOTT
Jessica Antonia Casillas Scott is an artist and doctoral student studying race and identity in the United States. Long-term, she hopes to create an arts residency at the Springfield Armory, and generous funding from Dr. Judith A. Barter Internship Fellowship helped her take the first steps toward that goal in summer 2023.
Putting the Past on the Map
On a brisk October morning, a small group gathered outside Historic Northampton’s Shepherd Barn. We were there for a tour of Bridge Street Cemetery—researched, scripted, and led by Jamie Mastrogiacomo ’24MA—but despite the season and setting, we weren’t in for frights. Instead, Mastrogiacomo (pictured below) avoided sensationalism and showed visitors tombstones from throughout the centuries, emphasizing the art and rhetoric of local funerary culture. The tour, which grew out of Mastrogiacomo’s summer Dr. Charles K. Hyde Public History Program Fellowship at Historic Northampton, was one of many where graduate students told new stories about familiar places.
Creating tours can pose productive challenges based on content, scope, or setting, as students in Jon Olsen’s Digital History class learned while designing an offering about local children’s book authors and illustrators in fall 2023. There were practical considerations—what locations could evoke the different authors’ life stories? Would the tour require participants to drive from stop to stop, or could it be accessible to those without a car? What activities can you recommend to families when they’re taking the tour independently? But students also wanted the tour to equip families with tools to address challenging topics. By pairing an interview with Hannah Moushabeck and her book Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine (Chronicle Books, 2023) with a stop at the Yiddish Book Center, the class encouraged tour-goers to think about diaspora communities and cultural traditions. In the photo above, graduate students Maya González, Purple Rathburn, and Caitlyn Foster take the children's book digital tour that their classmates developed.
When MA student Lauren Whitley-Haney created a driving tour of sites from Theodor Geisel’s (aka Dr. Seuss’s) childhood in Springfield, she had to think about how users of her tour would interact with the difficult history Geisel represented. By putting information about the harmful Asian stereotypes found in a Dr. Seuss book on the tour website, Whitley-Haney gave parents an opportunity to broach the topic with kids in their own way.
When Mastrogiacomo gave her third and final tour of Bridge Street Cemetery, she noticed something new: Flowers had been left between the graves of Sylva Church and Sarah Gray, two enslaved women she had discussed on the tour. “I’m proud that this story impacted visitors enough to remember their names and revisit their shared resting place to pay their respects,” she says.
—Joanna Hejl
Joanna Hejl ’24MA is a nonprofit fundraising professional at the Yiddish Book Center. She worked as the Public History Program assistant in 2023–24.
“As a kid, the vivid imaginary worlds of Dr. Seuss’s books inspired me and generations of other kids to love reading. To create the Dr. Seuss in Springfield Driving Tour, I immersed myself in the Wood Museum of Springfield History’s archives and selected tour stops that represented Ted’s childhood. I wrote and recorded scripts for each stop, then created a website for tour-goers to use for easy navigation. This past spring, I had the pleasure of sharing the tour with fellow Springfield residents during five talks at Springfield City Library branches and through an interview with local news channel WWLP.”
—Lauren Whitley-Haney
Dangerous Work, Broken Bodies: Examining the Human Cost of Empire on the Docks of Colonial Bombay
RESEARCH PROFILE | PRIYANKA SRIVASTAVA
Dock laborers were essential to the success of trade in colonial Bombay. But did the British government make adequate provisions for the health and safety of workers engaged in this notoriously difficult and dangerous work?
By the early 19th century, Bombay, a port city on the west coast of India, had emerged as a crucial hub of global trade. It functioned as a key connector between different regions of production, trade, and consumption. The expansion of maritime trade in Bombay created demand for a diverse group of laborers—stevedore and shore laborers, boatmen, carpenters, seafarers, and construction workers. These workers were engaged in port operations ranging from loading and unloading cargoes to dry docking, dredging, and repairing and maintaining ships, boats, and equipment. Their collective labor made Bombay a leading port city of the British Empire.
A scholar of labor, urban, and gender history in modern South Asia, Priyanka Srivastava’s current research specifically focuses on two categories of dock laborers—stevedore workers who handled goods on the ship and shore laborers who loaded and unloaded cargoes on the docks and in transit warehouses. Her work examines spaces and conditions under which “semi-skilled” and “unskilled” stevedore and shore workers labored. Handling of cargoes was notorious for its physically taxing work and frequency of accidents and injuries, which resulted in the loss of labor power, impoverishment, and death. Did the port authorities make any provisions for workers’ safety, or did the labor surplus economy of colonial Bombay allow them to de-prioritize the health and safety of their cargo handlers? What legal recourse and medical help, if any, were available to the injured workers and their families? Were there any technological improvements over time that made labor processes safer?
“How many of such deaths or injuries could have been prevented by reasonable care and attention?”—“Casualties at the Prince’s Dock,” The Times of India, June 12, 1884
Based on analyses of 19th- and early 20th-century labor records, Bombay Port Trust documents, newspaper reports, Industrial Commission papers, and reports of local voluntary organizations, Srivastava’s work examines continuities and changes in the practices of labor recruitment, work processes, medical provisions, and technological and legal shifts pertaining to workplace safety, compensation, and dock workers’ health. The broader objectives are to understand the workings of colonial labor markets, the limits of colonial labor laws, and the human cost of global capitalist enterprises. This essay-length work is part of a larger project that explores the lives and work of non-factory wage laborers in the colonial city of Bombay.
—Priyanka Srivastava
Priyanka Srivastava is an associate professor of history and economics. Her research examines the social and economic lives of rural migrants in the cities of British India. Srivastava offers courses on modern South Asia, urban and economic history, race and gender history, and the politics and history of imperialism and nationalism in the Indian subcontinent.
Home Field Advantage: Developing a Strength in the History of Sport
Traditionally, academic departments develop a strength in a particular field by intentionally hiring in it. Other times, specialties develop organically. That’s how the history department ended up with a growing strength in sport studies, with a number of faculty and graduate students offering very popular classes on sport and publishing in the field.
One of the nation’s leading scholars of the history and politics of Title IX, Elizabeth A. Sharrow is the co-author of the award-winning Equality Unfulfilled (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and a popular professor of both history and public policy. A recipient of numerous major grants and director of faculty research at the Institute for Social Science Research, Sharrow shares their expertise on race, gender, and the politics and impacts of public policy on sports history in leading academic and popular publications, including The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and even an ESPN docuseries.
Brian D. Bunk is a European historian whose most recent projects, both for the University of Illinois Press, center on sport: From Football to Soccer (2021) and “Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United States” (forthcoming).
His work examines the history of the world’s most popular sport in the United States and how soccer intersected with women’s rights, the growth of universities, and immigration. Bunk regularly teaches Global History of Sport and The Global History of Soccer and has taught Race and Sport in the 20th Century and a Junior Year Writing Seminar on Topics in Sport History.
For my own part, after publishing my third book on modern Brazil in 2023, I decided to write a history of football partially based on my American Gridiron Football class. The course was written in response to student interest during the pandemic and complements my History of Baseball course. The forthcoming book studies the development of the sport at colleges in New England and the Middle Atlantic states in the mid-19th century, the rise of high schools, the development of professional football, and the sport’s connections to politics on the local, state, and national levels, concluding in the present era.
Our undergraduate classes have impressive enrollments thanks in part to excellent teaching from graduate students such as Yuri Gama, 2023 recipient of the Simon and Satenig Ermonian Award and instructor of The Global History of Soccer, who is currently researching soccer in the Brazilian Amazon during World War II. Another Latin Americanist, Professor Emerita Jane Rausch, also publishes in sport history, including a 2023 article on the history of Colombia’s participation in the Olympics.
In April, our faculty and students benefited from a week with 2024 Writer-in-Residence Amy Bass, professor of sport studies at Manhattanville University. Bass’s week in Herter Hall included a public keynote on activism in sports, a class visit to our graduate writing history seminar, a community event at a local public library, and a roundtable on teaching sport. Attendees also had the chance to acquire copies of her latest book, One Goal: A Coach, A Team, and the Game That Brought a Divided Town Together (Hachette Books, 2018), on soccer and immigration in rural Maine. Her residency, a high point for historians of sport at UMass, was the capstone of a strong year for an unexpected strength in the department.
—Joel Wolfe
A historian of Latin America, Joel Wolfe has taught the history of baseball for over 20 years and was the organizer of this spring’s residency with sport historian Amy Bass.
Contributions to the Field
Brian D. Bunk, From Football to Soccer: The Early History of the Beautiful Game in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2021).
James N. Druckman and Elizabeth A. Sharrow, Equality Unfulfilled: How Title IX’s Policy Design Undermines Change to College Sports (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Still to Come
Brian D. Bunk, Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United States (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).
James N. Druckman and Elizabeth A. Sharrow, The Politics of Exclusion: Lessons from Transgender Participation in College Sports (Cambridge University Press, under contract).
Joel Wolfe, The American Game: Football and the Nation (Oxford University Press, under contract).
What Are Universities For?
The Unexpected Urgency of the 2024–25 Feinberg Series: Ongoing Feinberg Series Explores Historical Roots of Present-Day Crises in Higher Education
In September 2023, a group of history staff and faculty began talking about organizing the next Feinberg Series around the historical roots of crises faced by universities today. At the time, they wondered whether the subject would resonate beyond the campus community. Less than a year later, audiences all over the world found themselves riveted to news of police suppressing student-led protests on campuses across North America, including at UMass.
One of the founding premises of the Feinberg Series is that history helps make sense of current political struggles. And indeed, historians have helped contextualize the past year’s events with respect to Middle Eastern history as well as the history of student movements, policing, and civil liberties in the United States and globally. In May, the American Historical Association released a statement “deplor[ing] recent decisions among college and university administrators to draw on local and state police forces to evict peaceful demonstrators.” That month, six history faculty and graduate students were among the 134 people arrested during protests on the UMass Amherst campus. Asked why they did not withdraw in the face of police repression, one faculty member explained, “As a historian, I recognize the significance of this moment, and I know what side of history I want to be on.”
The dramatic events of the past year add greater poignancy and urgency to the theme of this year’s Feinberg Series: What Are Universities For? Higher education is widely regarded as essential to a flourishing democracy. But today, the university is in crisis—college costs have soared, student debt is in the trillions, and politicians are attacking critical thought.
The 2024–25 Feinberg Series is bringing together scholars, journalists, organizers, educators, community members, and students to examine the historic role, forms, and impacts of the American university. It proceeds on the conviction that rigorously examining the historical origins of the various “crises” currently engulfing the university is essential to reimagining a sustainable future for the institution—and for democracy itself.
—Jess Johnson, Sigrid Schmalzer, Asheesh Kapur Siddique, and Kevin Young, Feinberg Series co-chairs
The Feinberg Series is presented every other year by the UMass Amherst Department of History and made possible thanks to the generosity of Kenneth R. Feinberg ’67 and associates.
Fresh Ink: New Books Take Lessons from the Past
The Archive of Empire by Asheesh Kapur Siddique
We live in data-saturated times. Governments and corporations continuously gather information about our behavior and broker it to shape our social and economic lives. How did we arrive at this point? Asheesh Kapur Siddique’s book explores an early episode in the historical rise of the information society—the growth of the information order of the early modern British Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries, when sovereigns and corporations built infrastructures to gather data about Imperial activity across the Americas, Africa, and South Asia. He explores the profound debates that resulted about how that data should be controlled, used, and arranged—and even what kind of data mattered for Imperial rule.
“This book is essential to understanding our own challenges with information, public discourse, and the state and their origins in the colonial enterprise.”
—Jacob Soll, author of Free Market: The History of an Idea
The early modern data world that Siddique excavates might seem strange and distant from our own, and in many ways, it was—information was gathered and stored in mediums like parchment, paper, and manuscripts, rather than computers, cell phones, and cloud servers. At the same time, his book shows that many of the same questions that currently preoccupy us also were intensely debated in this earlier period: According to what rules should data be collected? How should it be used? And who should control it?
Our current debates about the role of data in society are, in this sense, nothing new—and as The Archive of Empire shows, they can never be disentangled from questions of political power, especially that of how data should represent us and what rights we should have over the control and use of our own data by governments and corporations. By looking at the very different world of the early modern British Empire, we may find insights that can guide us as we grapple with our present.
Asheesh Kapur Siddique, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World (Yale University Press, 2024).
Abolishing Fossil Fuels by Kevin A. Young
Kevin A. Young takes a historian’s approach to the existential threat posed by the fossil fuel industry. In four historic social movements—the abolition of slavery, battles for workers’ rights in the 1930s, Black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and the fight for clean air—he finds solutions that can guide contemporary climate activists. His book argues these movements were successful because they used boycotts, strikes, and other mass disruptions to force certain elites into confrontation with other parts of the ruling class. These historic victories, Young finds, were not typically won by electing and pressuring politicians; rather, gains in the electoral and legislative realms were usually the byproducts of uprisings in the fields, factories, and streets.
“With lucid and thorough historical analysis, Young shows how to win against the oil companies and their politicians. It’s a tour de force, and a gift to anyone lacking faith in the possibility of radical change.”
—Raj Patel, Author of Stuffed and Starved
In the case of today’s climate movement, Young argues that activists have been most successful when they’ve targeted the industry’s enablers: the banks, insurers, and big investors that finance its operations; the companies and universities that purchase fossil fuels; and the regulators and judges who make life-and-death rulings about pipelines, power plants, and drilling sites. In one major underappreciated victory, the movement has helped block or retire hundreds of coal-fired power plants in the United States over the past two decades, a trend that even the coal industry’s representatives in government have been unable to reverse.
Abolishing Fossil Fuels comes at a time when the tide is turning against the fossil fuel industry, but far too slowly to avert catastrophic global heating. Young argues that the lessons of past movements can help us build a stronger climate movement that can accelerate the industry’s decline in the decisive years ahead.
Kevin A. Young, Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won (PM Press, 2024).
In Memoriam: Ron D. Story, 1940–2024
Ron Story cut quite a figure on the UMass Amherst campus and around the larger university community. A wiry Texan (who long ago lost his Fort Worth lilt) with bright blue eyes, a trimmed mustache, and a graceful gait (he’d played schoolboy baseball), he had an analytical turn of mind and the look and bearing of a leader. His colleagues certainly thought so, electing him secretary of the Faculty Senate and president of their union, the Massachusetts Society of Professors. The higher-ups in the UMass president’s office in Boston agreed, appointing him vice chancellor for advancement on campus as well as academic vice president for the system as a whole.
Story remained primarily committed, however, to teaching and scholarship. Hired as an Americanist in 1972 with degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and Stony Brook University, he enjoyed a fruitful and distinguished career that started with The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800–1870 (Wesleyan University Press, 1980) and ended with George Biddle: The Art of American Social Conscience (Woodmere Art Museum, 2022). In between came works of breathtaking reach and range: Concise Historical Atlas of World War Two: The Geography of Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2005), Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), and various studies of baseball and Jackie Robinson. His main co-edited and co-authored works include Generations of Americans: A History of the United States (St. James Press, 1977), A More Perfect Union: Documents in U.S. History, Volume I (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984), and with Bruce Laurie, The Rise of Conservatism in America, 1945–2000 (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007). Such edited works, widely praised by teachers at all levels for their unerringly judicious selection of primary source materials, found their way for decades into U.S. surveys and courses on World War II. It came as no surprise that at the end of his career, Story was awarded the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award. His history of 19th-century Harvard taught us how to think about the evolution of institutions more broadly, his study of Edwards changed how we think about this important minister, and his portrait of George Biddle rescued a gifted artist from obscurity.
Story was not simply an eminent colleague; he was also a close personal friend of mine. We shared common political interests and mutual intellectual tastes and we rooted for the same sports teams, routinely checking in with one another daily from our neighboring offices. We were saps for the feckless Red Sox, suffering through many games together in Fenway Park. We also enjoyed outdoor adventures in Maine, not all of which marked us as Renaissance men as comfortable in the wilds as in our offices. In the middle of the 1970s, we made the foolish mistake of trying to spend a winter weekend in my family’s mid-19th-century vacation farmhouse. We were badly underequipped to begin with and at the mercy of the weather when the temperature dipped to about zero. Forced to cook our meals on one of the fireplaces, we had trouble keeping the wood aflame, which defeated persistent efforts to heat cans of beef stew and beans. The less said of Story’s attempt to make cornbread, the better. A few years later, a friend of his in Boston invited us on week-long canoe trips on the Allagash and St. John Rivers in northern Maine. We eased along on the serene Allagash marveling at the abundant wildlife and taking turns reading from Thoreau’s lyrical The Maine Woods. The ferocious St. John, however, required undivided attention. We got through its early riffles and patches of white water like seasoned oarsmen. But later on, following a pass through a demanding series of rapids, we got distracted for having paused to celebrate the feat, only to wind up at a huge boulder not 10 feet from the prow of the canoe. I thought we took outstanding evasive action by burying our oars deep into the water to make an abrupt turn. Story thought otherwise, insisting that the boulder had moved. We never did resolve our differences but certainly enjoyed the tale in its retelling.
Ron Story passed away at age 83. Deeply devoted to his family, he leaves behind Ellen Story, his first spouse (and former state representative), and their sons, Christopher and Timothy, as well as Nova, his loving grandchild and crafty chess partner who challenged him in friendly matches both at home and in their hideaway of the library at the old Boltwood Tavern in Amherst. He is also survived by Laura Ricard, his longtime partner, as well as his former colleagues and monthly lunch partners Leonard Richards, Roland Sarti, and Bruce Laurie.
—Bruce Laurie
Photo: Bruce Laurie (second from L), Ron Story (fifth from L) and friends, after a canoe trip on the St. John River in Maine, 1977.
In Memoriam: Alon Confino, 1959-2024
Our esteemed and highly respected colleague, Alon Confino, director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (IHGMS) and professor of history and Judaic and Near Eastern studies, died June 27 after a long illness. A funeral was held at the Congregation B’nai Israel cemetery in Northampton on July 2.
Confino joined the UMass Amherst faculty in 2017 and was appointed Chair of Holocaust studies in 2018. Pen tishkach, or “lest you forget” in Hebrew, is the guiding principle behind the anonymously endowed chair, which is awarded to a distinguished scholar of the Holocaust who serves as director of the IHGMS. Confino was a natural fit.
The author of the influential A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014), Confino was an expert on modern German and European history, the Holocaust and genocide, Zionism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Under Confino’s leadership, the IHGMS broadened its subject matter to include genocide, mass violence, racial discrimination, and other topics related to the Holocaust, including different Palestinian and Jewish experiences of the foundation of Israel in 1948, about which he was completing a book before his death.
An important public intellectual who wrote essays on the use and misuse of the Holocaust by the media, Confino recently helped organize and draft an influential global definition of antisemitism, known as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.
“A highly regarded scholar in the international community, Alon was known within his department for his creative ability to bring together differing voices and focus on the importance of dialogue,” says Joye Bowman, former interim dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and professor of history.
“Professor Confino was my irreplaceable friend and colleague in both of his roles as a member of my department and director of the IHGMS,” says David Mednicoff, chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and associate professor of Middle Eastern studies and public policy. “His deep expertise, erudition, and empathy for diverse people’s experience around genocide and prejudice made him a cherished source of wisdom and role model around engaged scholarship and teaching. During these challenging days of global and local political polarization, and the ongoing war in Gaza, I am especially sad that we are deprived of my friend’s essential and clear-headed voice.”
Anne Broadbridge, chair and professor of history, adds, “Since his diagnosis last year, we in the Department of History have been heartbroken and struggling to manage in his absence. He was entirely unique and a treasured colleague and person. All along, we hoped he would return to us one day. Now that he cannot, our loss is profound.”
A native of Jerusalem, Confino previously held concurrent appointments as a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and the University of Virginia from 2013–17. He joined the University of Virginia faculty in 1992 as an assistant professor and was appointed professor in 2006.
The author of five additional books and dozens of articles and book chapters, Confino was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011. While on a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship in 2016–17, he worked on a book on 1948 in Palestine and Israel that tells two stories: one based on the experience of Arabs, Jews, and the British drawing on letters, diaries, and oral history, and the second placing 1948 within global perspectives of decolonization, forced migrations, partitions, and postwar diplomacy and the Cold War.
He had been an associate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (2013–17) and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (2011–12) at the University of Virginia. He was also a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. In 2009–10, he co-directed the project “Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in the Modern World” at the University of Virginia. Confino was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006 and has also been a visiting professor at Tel Aviv University and the New York University/University of Virginia program in London. He was directeur d’etudes at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1999. Confino was also the recipient of fellowships from the Humboldt Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Israel Academy of Sciences. As a graduate student, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Fellowship.
He received his BA in history in 1985 from Tel Aviv University before pursuing graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was awarded his MA in 1986 and his PhD in 1992.
REMEMBRANCES
“I admired Alon Confino most for his empathy, his gift to listen to people and understand their perspectives. He was able to take controversial positions in history and still win friends because he affirmed his interlocutors, then kindly explained why he disagreed.” —Andrew Donson
“Throughout his career, Alon took genuine delight in encouraging the contributions of colleagues whose scholarly interests and accomplishments were so different from his own. During the IHGMS’s faculty seminar on the year 1948, each of us contributed a little, but thanks to Alon’s efforts and the welcoming environment he created, we collectively received so much more back.” —David Glassberg
“Alon was an extraordinary mentor who approached his students with the same compassion and sensitivity he extended to his historical subjects. He taught us that the most meaningful history requires not only rigorous research but also radical empathy, imagination, and curiosity.” —Maya González ’23MA and Eric Ross ’20, ’22MA
“I plan to spend the rest of my life learning to live by the principle Alon taught me: When facing a painful or controversial issue, don’t shy away and don’t shut it down. Have the conversation.” —Sigrid Schmalzer
“I’ll miss discussing everything from complex historical ideas to plans for the weekend with Alon, whose thoughts were always interesting and carefully considered.” —Joel Wolfe
Faculty, Staff and Student News
Class Notes
2024 Graduates, Award-Winners and Theses
THE CLASS OF 2024
The history department warmly congratulates the graduates of the class of 2024 on this truly remarkable accomplishment! For years, you’ve inspired us in the classroom, and now, we wish you luck and fulfillment as you venture into the world.
AWARD-WINNING STUDENTS
Thanks to our generous donors, the history department offers numerous scholarships that support experiential learning, including student research and travel, language study, and internships. Awards also offset students’ costs, champion first-generation students and future teachers, and reward students’ academic and community efforts, such as exceptional teaching and writing. Congratulations to the awardees!
THESES AND DISSERTATIONS
Our Donors
The Department of History is grateful for contributions from friends and alumni. The following list includes those who made donations between July 2023 and June 2024.
Edward J. Albrecht
Barry M. Alman
Melvyn W. Altman
Erin M. Anderson
Mary A. Anderson
Thomas F. Army, Jr.
Rev Virginia W. G. Army
Roger A. Atwood
Alexander J. Austin III
Judith J. Austin
Geoffrey M. Bagshaw
Jeffrey S. Baker
Martha Reed Baker
Ashley L. Jahrling Bannon
Judith A. Barter
Kristi N. Barnwell
Guy B. Barnett
Mary Jo Bazarian-Murray
Donald P. Blood
Therese R. Blood
Robert J. Burgess
Edward D. Burke
Marilyn J. Burke
Carole G. Buzun
Eileen Callahan
Frank R. Callahan
Thomas P. Campbell
Brenda D. Canter
Gerald L. Canter
Francis Cash
Michael C. Cass
Charlie B. Christel
Barbara Ciolino
Richard L. Cocivera
Michael F. Coltrara
John J. Connors, Jr.
Thomas J. Conroy
Bruce E. Colton
Allen J. Davis
Sean F. Delaney
John S Dickson
Mary B. Dickson
John J. Donahue
Michael F. Earls
Paul F. Ellis-Graham
Christopher T. Fang
John D. Fiero
James R. Finkle
Lee W. Formwalt
Robert F. Forrant
Eric C. Forsgard
Jane E. Forsgard
Lisa Y. Tendrich Frank, PhD
Ilene S. Freedman
Carolyn Galambos
Anita Garoppolo
James L. Gmeiner
Gerard Golden, Jr.
Richard J. Goulet
Cheryl L. Grenning
Joshua P. Grey
Michael J. Grossman
Flora M. Guzik
Richard J. Guzik
Chan U. Ha
Kristin L. Hayward-Strobel
Stuart S. Heller
Lawrence G. Herman
Douglas J. Hersey
Jennifer N. Heuer
Paul C. Hughes
Charles K. Hyde
John R. Hyslop
John R. Jackson
Justin F. Jackson
Theodore W. Jones
Marybeth M. Joyce
Cynthia P. Kadzik
Daniel H. Kenney
Eric P. Knight
Christopher M. Krein
Sandra C. Krein
Jeannette L. Kuske
Kenneth K. Kuske
Maryelise S. Lamet
Linda J. Lamont
Peter T. Lamothe
Audrey L. Larvey
Bruce G. Laurie
Leslie T. Laurie
Jeremy L. Laverdiere
Rachel Lavery
Francis J. Leazes Jr.
Brenda J. LeBlanc
Richard D. LeBlanc
Sean T. LeBlanc
Mike J. Levins
Eric N. Lindquist
David A. Long
Catherine E. Luther
Patrick E. Lynch
Carlo Antonio MacDonald
Charles H. MacPhaul
John M. Macuga
Margaret Macuga
Sharon G. Macuga
James A. Madaio
Stephanie J. Maher
Edward A. Mainzer
Patricia M. Campbell Malone
Brian F. McCabe
Richard J. McCraw, Jr.
Kerry R. McDonough
Kevin L. McDowell
Dorothy McFarland
Gerald W. McFarland
R. Michael McSweeney
Barbara D. Merino-Mayper
James A. Miara
Robert D. Moran
John D. Morton
The Honorable Robert D. Myers
Charles J. Myrbeck
Alice Nash
Joan M. Norman
Katherine Novick
Stuart J. Novick
Ingrid H. Nowak
Kathleen B. Nutter
Lawrence E. O’Brien
Edward J. O’Day Jr.
Malcolm J. O’Sullivan
Brian W. Ogilvie
Jonathan J. Oliver
Laura E. Pagington
Andrew J. Paraskos
Renaldo E. Payne
Steven Perry
Richard E. Pierce
Charles W. Pieterse
Felicity Pool
Susan L. Porter
Janet R. Potash
Ericka S. Prew
Thomas L. Prew
Barry M. Pritzker
Ashley M. Purvis
Joseph Quintero
Samuel J. Redman
Maryanne Reed
Patricia R. Roper
The Honorable Mary-Lou Rup
Dorothy D. Siles
William H. Siles
Ralph J. Simmons
David N. Skolnick
Christopher M. Small
Brian H. Smith
Nancy K. Smith
Stephen F. Smith
Richard W. Sprague
Jo-Ann T. Strangis
Janet C. Stokesbury
Christoph Strobel
Kenneth C. Sullivan
Mark L. Sullivan
Mary M. Sullivan
Bethany Zecher Sutton
Kent J. Taylor
Allen S. Torrey
Stanley P. Tozeski
Mark A. Vezzola
Katherine M. Wahl
Paul B. Watlington III
Kazue O. Watlington
Lt. Col. Peter J. Webber (Ret.)
Peter H. Weis
Glendyne R. Wergland
Lee R. Whitaker
Marcus R. Widenor
Norman S. Winnerman
Joseph J. Wisboro
Judith T. Wisboro
Helen M. Wise
John T. Wolohan
Nicole Wolohan
Kathleen M. Wroblewski
Shira B. Yoffe
Qiqin Zhao
Nancy J. Ziemlak
Credits
Past, Present & Future is published annually by the UMass Amherst Department of History.
Editorial
Jess Johnson, co-editor
Amelia Yeager, co-editor
Joanna Hejl, co-editor, “Public History” section
Tirzah Frank, fact-checker
with
Anne Broadbridge, Sarah Cornell, Sam Redman, Garrett Washington, Lauren Whitley-Haney, Joel Wolfe
Design
University Marcom Group
Image Credits
The photographs within were taken by members of the history department and Jason Kotoch. Attribution for archival images and artwork: “Making Memory,” Camilo Del Cerro; “American Anarchy,” Library of Congress; “Clothes Encounters,” Le Gip Archive; “A Revolution Across the Arts and Sciences,” Stefan R. Landsberger Collection, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; “History of / at Work," Springfield Armory National Historic Site; “Dangerous Work, Broken Bodies,” Dinodia Photos; "What Are Universities For?", Julia Handschuh; “Fresh Ink," Associated Press.
KEEPING IN THE LOOP
Check out our department’s blog, past@present, which features posts by faculty, students, emeriti, and alumni, then visit our YouTube channel to see and hear a sampling of our department’s public talks.
Make History. Make Your Gift Today.
Your generosity makes a difference! It supports student scholarships so they can research and learn languages overseas, be honored for their excellent writing, or undertake summer study and internships. Your gift could support cutting-edge historical research by both faculty and students. Or you might contribute to high-impact public programs, like our K–12 series for teachers. We invite you to give back to the next generation of students and scholars!
To give, visit umass.edu/history/give-history or send a check made out to “UMass Foundation” to:
Records and Gift Processing
Memorial Hall
134 Hicks Way
Amherst, MA 01003-9270
Be sure to note “Department of History” on the memo line. We appreciate your support!